Hello,
we are planning to deploy some of our databases on AIX/LPAR based servers (we didn't bought it yet ...). IBM's engineers says that if we want to boot them from SAN the hardware array has to be compatible with MPIO but they don't want to deliver any document with list of arrays supported with MPIO (and I don't want to tell them what kind of arrays we use). Does such document exists ?
Before you decide on that you may want to check and make sure the native mpio supports active/active multipathing. For some reason I was thinking that the native is only active/passive on AIX, but i may be wrong. Anyway, we use HDLM active/active round robin extended load balancing, for our databases which works pretty well. For databases performance is probably going to be one of you main concearns and you will want active/active load balancing.
But HDLM can be used only with HDS arrays. Is that true ? How about other vendors ?
They all should have their own multipathing software. For instance EMC uses Powerpath. Just contact your storage vendor and see what they have. Obviously it is not free like the native multipathing.
All the storage Vendors should have their own Multipathing software, atleast the big ones. EMC uses Powerpath, Hiatchi uses HDLM, etc... I would just contact your storage vendor and see what they recommend you use.
That is why I wanted to use MPIO - to avoid installing additional (non-free) software.